A higly valued group of historical place names is comprised of names of the type Egrimihalhaza ‘village of a person called Mihály and Egri [i.e. from Eger]’. Their distinctive feature is that they signal very early the existence of the new name type in the making since as early as the 13th century: the multielement personal name. However, beyond data reporting, little has been said so far about how these toponymic data can be utilised in historical anthroponomastics. I intend to answer this question in my work: I will briefly touch upon what these data are suitable for and then I will give a more indepth description of what they cannot be used for and why.
One great advantage of early toponymic data containing personal names is that the personal names in them, unlike personal name data, often appear in the Latin language sources not in their Latin or Latinised versions but in Hungarian. These place names can serve as complementary data in onomastics: they show what the Hungarian sound of individual personal names looked like in the given period.
In addition, place names of the Egrimihalhaza type also prove that in Hungarian place names the byname (and later the surname that was formed from it) had preceded the given name from the very beginning. We can appreciate the significance of this only if we know that sources had showed structures of multi-element personal names almost exclusively in the Latin order until the 15th century.
At the same time, place names formed from personal names cannot be used in the personal name statistics of a given period since, in the absence of evidence of history of ownership we have no way of knowing whether the person after whom a place was named was still alive at the time of the writing of the charter.
The Egrimihalhaza type is not suitable for family name collection, since there is no knowing whether the name element in it that was linked to the given name was
hereditary or not. On the other hand, even if, due to the relatively late occurrence of the data, we could be certain that the first element of the structure of the personal name is a surname, we cannot know, due to a lack of other data, whether the name referred to a contemporary owner or a much earlier one. Considering all this, we should treat this type of personal name otherwise considered special with more criticism when using it in personal name research, after careful consideration of what it can be used to support with a high degree of certainty and what it cannot.
Valéria Tóth
Reflections on Personal Names of Toponymic Origin
Among descriptive personal names in the old Hungarian name system, a significant proportion was made up of name forms containing a toponymic lexeme. From a functionalsemantic aspect, these names, in the case of the nobility, refer to the location of their feudal holdings or their places of residence, while in the case of those of lower social standing, they identify their places of residence or their places of origin.
From a morphological perspective, the descriptive personal names that are related to a location can be of two kinds: derived from a toponym without a formant (e.g., Nógrád settlement name > Nógrád personal name), or toponyms with an -i suffix (e.g., Kövesd settlement name > Kövesd-i personal name). That is to say, there have been two processes of evolution playing a part in the formation of such forms of personal names: metonymy and giving personal names with the name formant -i (as, unlike others, I reckon that the personal names Debreceni, Budai have been derived from the toponyms Debrecen, Buda with the addition of the derivational suffix -i, and not from the adjectival forms of debreceni, budai).
Personal names coming from a place name with a formant of the type Budai are much more common than those without a formant of the type Buda, and the assessment of the latter is not unanimous in the relevant critical literature either.
In this paper, I contend that the personal names of the type Buda are not alien to Hungarian conventions of personal namegiving, as there are such surnames around even today, and the kind of metonymy (that has created them) has always been a typical and salient means of word and name formation in Hungarian.
While exploring the characteristic features of the medieval system of personal names, I have primarily relied upon the relevant data available in written sources.
However, quite frequently, it is not so easy to determine the real spokenlanguage use value of the structures denoting persons in medieval charters written in Latin (for example, in trying to decide if behind the Latin structure denoting a person
of the type Clemens de Barach ka there used to be the Hungarian name form Baracska or Baracskai, we can only stand a chance to make the right decision if there are also further information available for us). I have also tried to elaborate on this issue in my paper. Finally, I have also discussed some aspects concerning whether there could be restrictions in the case of this type of personal names or not: namely, if the toponymic structures influence which process of name creation is used to derive anthroponyms from them on the one hand; and if it is possible for anthroponyms to be derived from them at all on the other hand.
7. Regional Diversity of Place Names
Eszter Ditrói